Unesco pays tribute to Albert Einstein on his 70th birthday
Unesco pays tribute to Albert Einstein on his 70th birthday
Albert Einstein was born seventy years ago, on 14 March 1879, in Germany. When he was still a boy, his family moved first to Switzerland and then to Italy. He wasn't a very bright boy. He didn't care for any school subjects, except mathematics; and he disliked the disciplines of German schools enough to run away at least once. He had some difficulty in qualifying to take a degree. And the best job he could get was as a minor official in the Swiss Patent Office.
That is what Einstein was in 1905: a junior Swiss patent official. But that year, 1905, was his annus mirabilis, his wonderful year. In that year, at the age of 26, he published a series of papers which made outstanding advances in three qtr.'te separate branches of physics. The most of famous these was his first paper on Relativity. In ten years from 1905, Einstein created a revolution in physics. He became at the same time a recognized leader and the enfant terrible of science.
For Einstein, the seventieth the greatest birthday scientist of Albertof our generation, and one of the great men of our time, Unesco prepared a special radio programme for its"World Review".
The persons whom Unesco invited to pay this Tribute to Albert Einstein, the man, the scientist and pionner of the human spirit, are themselves leaders of science in our day: the famous American scientist and educator, Dr. Arthur Compten; the distinguished French mathematician, Professor Jacques Hadamard; and the great Danish physicist, Niels Bohr. But they speak not for science alone but for all humanity. The homage they pay is to the man and the pioneer rather than the specialist. And they speak of Einstein, and to Einstein. not as specialists but as friends.